"There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it"
About this Quote
Moral rules don’t glide into your life like inspirational posters; they arrive like speed bumps. Diderot’s line is a bracing Enlightenment corrective to the fantasy that ethics is clean, painless, and conveniently aligned with self-interest. The point isn’t that morality is impossible, but that it is definitionally frictional: a “precept” only matters when it blocks your easiest option. If it never costs you anything, it’s not a moral claim so much as a personal preference wearing a halo.
The wording does sly work. “No moral precept” is a totalizing swipe at the pieties of his era, when church doctrine and social hierarchy often passed as “virtue” precisely because they were comfortable for the people in charge. “Something inconvenient” sounds almost domestic, like misplacing your keys, and that understatement is the knife twist. Diderot makes the sacrifice of doing right feel ordinary and unavoidable, not heroic and rare. He punctures moral vanity: the person who boasts of principles usually hasn’t met the invoice yet.
Context matters. As editor of the Encyclopedie, Diderot helped build a machine for questioning inherited authority. This sentence fits that project: it’s an argument for moral seriousness over moral theater, and a warning against systems that make “virtue” effortless for elites while demanding pain from everyone else. The subtext is political as much as personal: if your ethics never inconvenience you, they’re probably designed to keep you comfortable rather than to keep you honest.
The wording does sly work. “No moral precept” is a totalizing swipe at the pieties of his era, when church doctrine and social hierarchy often passed as “virtue” precisely because they were comfortable for the people in charge. “Something inconvenient” sounds almost domestic, like misplacing your keys, and that understatement is the knife twist. Diderot makes the sacrifice of doing right feel ordinary and unavoidable, not heroic and rare. He punctures moral vanity: the person who boasts of principles usually hasn’t met the invoice yet.
Context matters. As editor of the Encyclopedie, Diderot helped build a machine for questioning inherited authority. This sentence fits that project: it’s an argument for moral seriousness over moral theater, and a warning against systems that make “virtue” effortless for elites while demanding pain from everyone else. The subtext is political as much as personal: if your ethics never inconvenience you, they’re probably designed to keep you comfortable rather than to keep you honest.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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